Does Ruby support verbatim strings?

Question

Is there support in Ruby for (for lack of a better word) non-escaped (verbatim) strings?

Like in C#:

@"c:\Program Files\"

...or in Tcl:

{c:\Program Files\}

Answer 1

Yes, you need to prefix your string with % and then a single character delineating its type.

The one you want is %q{c:\program files\}.

The pickaxe book covers this nicely here, section is General Delimited Input.

Answer 2

This has a couple examples that may be what you are looking for: Ruby Syntax

Answer 3

Besides %q{string}, you can also do the following:

string =<<SQL
  SELECT * 
  FROM Book
  WHERE price > 100.00
  ORDER BY title;
SQL

The delimiters are arbitrary strings, conventionally in uppercase.

Answer 4

mystring = %q["'\t blahblahblah]

Or if you want to interpret \t as tab:

mystring = %Q["'\t blahblahblah]

Answer 5

You can just use a single quoted string.

>> puts "a\tb"
a    b
=> nil
>> puts 'a\tb'
a\tb
=> nil

Answer 6

I can't seem to find anything that doesn't escape... I've tried all of these, maybe I've got an old version of ruby. Basically, no matter how I try to write a\b, it always escapes the central slashes to a single one.

Answer 7

Even this board escaped it - I mean a\\b